Deepmind worked on reinforcement learning for plasma control back in 2022 and this also led to a paper in nature. I don't really understand the differences between their earlier work and this paper but deepmind don't seem to be involved in this one: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/accelerating-fusion-sc...
The DeepMind paper in turn cites the authors of this paper, previously. One of the big differences in the current paper is that the experimental device is much larger and more powerful, and the duration of the shot is longer as well.
I remember having this idea when I was studying machine learning in college. I'm really happy to see that it occurred to someone else in a position to actually look into it, because it "felt like something might be there" to me.
The basic idea I had was that fusion plasma containment involves containing a turbulent, dynamical system, so it might require some kind of actual intelligence learning or co-evolving with the system.
I wondered if this might be the only way to achieve over-unity fusion outside gravitational confinement (stars, black hole accretion disks, etc.). This would mean there are two fusion mechanisms in nature: gravitational confinement and cognitive confinement. The latter can only be a product of a living system.
When a living system achieves this, its biosphere "ignites" and becomes something I termed a "biostar." Biostars could be potential SETI targets -- biospheres that have harnessed fusion and so emit anomalous amounts of optical and infrared radiation on their night side. This moment of ignition would be an event in a biosphere comparable to the evolution of photosynthesis-- a fundamental change in the energetic dynamics of life.
In the far future life the that achieved fusion could settle things like rogue planets in deep space, so that would be another potential SETI target. Find objects emitting anomalous infrared in the interstellar void. The advantage would be being far from destructive events like solar storms.
Captain's Log: Since we came to orbit Venuuil III to host talks between the Klingons and the Venullians, there has been a increased incidence of unpredictable fluctuations of plasmas in the warp drive containment field. We are now devoting all available power to increasing our computer's ability to track and predict this rapidly changing phenomenon. Geordi reports that at the current growth factor we can maintain containment for 22 hours, 47 minutes, 17 seconds. To support the peace talks, we will remain here as long as possible.
Captain's Log: Intriguingly, the fluctuations are beginning to reveal an embedded temporal distortion that exhibits language like patterns. Data has begun working on an interface between the containment field and his positronic neural net.
In Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth series of books, true artificial general intelligence 'woke up' from the computers designed to handle the incredibly complex calculations required to make and maintain long-distance wormhole connections. Quite analogous to this situation I feel
And then formed a treaty with humans, providing Restricted Intelligences for high performance computing without self awareness creation, and then retreating to it's own planet.
Currently imaginable fusion power plants generate nowhere near enough power for the excess to be visible from outer space. They would not even be a blip compared to the largest already existing hydro power plant, for example.
Edit: to add some numbers, the "planned" DEMO power plant (the hypothetical successor of a successful ITER experiment) would produce something like 750MW, while Three Gorges Dam produces 22,500MW. Even if DEMO could be scaled up (which is hard, given that it would already be beyond the limits of today's material science), it definitely couldn't scale up 30 times.
Nothing except the costs, but then it's not a single reactor anymore and other power plants scale as or more easily. So nothing is really special about fusion power if we just want to scale horizontally.
- vs fossil fuels, almost limitless fuel with no greenhouse gas emissions
- vs nuclear fission, more fuel compared to current designs (though breeder reactors could essentially use any piece of rock as fuel), and shorter lived but even more toxic outputs (at least for D-T fusion, all pieces of the reactor become highly radioactive materials after 10-20 years)
- vs renewables, it has the advantage of being decoupled from weather and day/night patterns, but it is more expensive, it requires fuel, and it produces much more toxic outputs
The concept of "cognitive confinement" (your term I presume. It's neat, I hope it sticks) was explored in Spiderman 2.
I'm being entirely serious. Even though the visualization of the reactor was wildly off the mark, this specific concept fits what the writers had in mind with the AI mechanical limbs.
That would actually make them easier to spot, as they'd need to flip around for a breaking burn roughly equal to their acceleration burn, pointing their engines straight at us. (Assuming they want to stop by and say hi, of course. If not, then there's not much to worry about.)
If they intend to go straight through Earth at relativistic speeds (to establish a hyperspace bypass, perhaps?), then there's really not much we can do about it anyway. :p
Fusion drives wouldn't allow these ships to get anywhere near the speed of light, so we would have ample time to see the light they emit long before they arrive.
Fusion is reasonably easy. You can do it in your garage with an electrostatic confinement fusor. I’m talking about fusion that generates significantly more power than it takes to run the reactor. Only that kind is useful as an energy source. That so far has been elusive.
Inertial confinement has sort of achieved this but only on paper. If you tally up the total input to set up and run the system it’s still way in the red.
ITER has the potential to run just a bit over unity but it’s really just a research platform.
Except that fusion on earth will likely never be cheaper than solar/wind.
I mean that is a cool scifi story, but economics seems to hate cool things.
There's this "big lie" that fusion people imply that it will be cheap, clean, and limitless.
Cheap is doubtful, clean is undermined by the reality that fast neutrons from fusion degrade the reactor to radioactive isotopes, and ok the fuel is pretty much limitless
Now, if we can get scalable fusion as viable load levelling, to develop it to the point it can be used in space then that's some real scifi.
I thought so too. It’s pretty simple: if you’re making a nuclear thermal power plant a lot of the costs are associated with building the containment vessel and the heat exchange mechanism. Fusion is fundamentally lower power density than fission, so you’ll need a bigger vessel for a given power, and both the containment and heat exchange mechanism are far more complex and expensive. Thermal fusion will never be cheaper than fission, which already has a hard time competing with renewables. And renewables are still getting cheaper.
But then there’s Helion. If you can extract electrical power directly rather than through heat exchange and a turbine, it changes the equation drastically. So I think their approach can work from a theoretical point of view.
We won't, not with anything resembling current technology. So, if we were to imagine a colonized solar system, there is a good chance it's not fusion that gets us there, but some currently unknown technology.
I'm not talking just about transportation, I'm also talking about the technology required to make an actually self-sustaining human colony anywhere outside the Earth. That is the part that only exists in principle - when you go to the details, we don't actually have any idea how we could build even a Mars colony that is truly self-sustaining, never mind one on a more inhospitable world.
Note that when I say self-sustaining, I don't just mean power, food, air, and water. I mean everything that a high-tech colony actually needs - plastics, machined parts, microprocessors, software, and so on.
Power can be beamed out to interstellar distances, so fusion isn't necessary.
For that matter, if a space colony is equipped with a mirror for concentrating the sunlight needed to illuminate the inside as if it were Earth, and we place the limiting distance as that at which the mass of the mirror is equal to the mass of the space colony, the distance is about 1 light year.
> ... Calculating tearing stability requires massive computational simulations based on resistive magnetohydrodynamics or gyrokinetics, which are not suitable for real-time stability prediction and control during experiments. This suggests the need for AI-accelerated real-time instability-avoidance techniques.
I’m not sure I’m ready to trust an ml system that will control a fusion power plant. The potential of the the mistake making a ( bizarre, ml-like ) mistake seems very high to me.
Also like AI, we have natural examples as existence proofs it is possible, followed by narrow non-generalised artificial examples, yet actually getting it working properly is very hard.
I kinda get the feeling there are a core of scientists who want to work on this stuff.
They'll work on it even if there is no hope of commercial fusion power, simply for academic kudos. Government's will fund it simply because there isn't much other blue skies physics research to fund.
60 years of high-energy physics breakthroughs! Not to mention material breakthroughs, laser breakthroughs, chemistry breakthroughs, control theory breakthroughs...
Today's high energy physics is at an energy some eight orders of magnitude higher than the temperatures in fusion plasmas. That's a larger ratio than between fusion plasmas and room temperature.
Tokamak is dumb. I'm sick of hearing about Tokamak.
The plasma in the Safire reactor has self-containing magnetic fields and doesn't need the $20billion+ super-magnet infrastructure. A Safire reactor costs under $20-million to build, and probably much less these days.
The Safire reactor can keep the plasma lit and going for hours if not days without interruption. The Safire reactor has been around for over seven years now.
Has it been verified to actually work? A 7 year old fusion startup focusing energy on a documentary doesn't scream serious scientific research to me...
The Safire type 2 reactor has been working for over seven years now. The documentary they already made is to document the process of creating the Safire type 3 reactor which can process liquid.
The results of the Safire type 3 reactor rendering radioactive material benign were done by a third party, which means independent, laboratory. They literally spell this out in terms that even a complete idiot can understand in the documentary you just pointed out. Hence why a very small part of their team spent some documenting what the science team did to make Safire type 3.
Given you wrote "focusing energy on a documentary doesn't scream serious", you give the impression you are just going to ignore the findings they have published. There's plenty video showing the plasma running for far more than the "world records" of these external-magnet reactors (Tokomak, and that other Helion one), so I don't know what to point you to that can actually help you.
In the documentary they published, they do waste the viewer's time with "look at this lab we built", but if they feel passionate about telling the story of their journey, that's fine. Also in the documentary, they share some of their data and what they did to validate that data with a third party.
I suspect the current record for sustained plasma is owned by fluorescent lighting, so not sure that's a valuable metric.
My comment that it doesn't seem like "serious science" means that I'm going to ignore anything not peer reviewed and I suggest others do the same.
I honestly still wish them the best, they just have a lot of work to convince anyone they're really dealing with anything new or interesting, and I don't think that video production is the path to that.
The results of the Safire type 3 reactor were verified by a third party lab. It's amazing that you can just post out of your ass like that as if you have any idea what the hell you're talking about.
Maybe I'm just bad at it but your claim does not show up on Google. Can you please give me a report that shows which lab verified it and the results? And no, a random video from the Safire website does not count because my assumption is that they are scam artists.
If you sincerely believe they are scam artists, then please explain something for us.
The finding, shared at the EU 2017 conference here https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7y46wMAHnsI , documented on video, is an example of a Langmuir probe (a tungsten rod) evaporating.
After the tungsten rod evaporated, the Safire team tried a much larger tungsten rod which did not immediately evaporate, but rapidly decayed, as was documented.
If the Safire team is a team of scam artists, how were they able to do something new that had not been done* before?
Is there any example of this given before year 2017? Is any other team able to take credit for this finding?
[*] done unclassified, many suspect this knowledge was already attained in classified (as in national security secrets) type environments.
>> your claim does not show up on Google.
I want to make sure I answer your question, can you narrow down which claim you are asking about?
As far as "which laboratory verified the results of the Safire type 3 reactor rendering radioactive material benign?", I will reach out to them and just ask them.
The EU 2017 conference is not a science conference, it's a pseudo-science conference with little to no evidence or science behind it. Anyone claiming any wild thing can go and present there. There is no actual peer reviewed evidence here.
So as long as no reputable independent team is a able to verify their claims, I'll remain extremely sceptical. So far all we have are wild claims and fancy videos all from a single source and that just won't cut it to convince me.
Given the details the Aureon team has shared, very clearly not Rossi's lab. I don't want to hurt your feelings or whatever here, I'm just going to be very very honest with you, if your comment wasn't so obviously in bad faith, that would be a very dumb guess.
Here is video footage of plasma in a Safire reactor causing a tungsten rod to rapidly decay, or at least that's what looks like is happening, not "vaporizing" (in scientific terms)
I did my masters in Tokamak simulation so maybe I'm biased (though I am a bit of a stellarator fanboy).
But I've never heard of SAFIRE. I've been on their website, and I can't find anything explaining what SAFIRE is and especially nothing about why it's so much better than a Tokamak. I can't find anything peer-reviewed.
All their marketing materials are leaving a very bad (e.g. pseudoscience) taste in my mouth
Here is what was shared, including some raw video footage, of what happened when a small tungsten rod was exposed to plasma in a Safire type 2 chamber.
https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7y46wMAHnsI
I'm a technical audience. I'd love to see a technical explanation of what their device is. This video is just "an anode" and "electrical power," which basically just sounds like a Farnsworth Fusor. Those are neat toys but not useful for a sustained fusion reaction.
I have seen some examples of Farnsworth Fusor on the web but they are admittedly (stated by those posting the videos) amateur. Can you show me strong examples of something that could be called "industrial class" that is in the category of Farnsworh Fusor?
As far as I am presently aware, a Farnsworth Fusor has not produced multiple plasma layers.
>> but not useful for a sustained fusion reaction.
The plasma in Safire meets the definition of "sustained fusion reaction", but whether this particular sustained fusion reaction is useful or not is a legitimate bigger question.
A Farnsworth Fusor does not create multiple plasma layers each separated by self-containing magnetic fields. This would be the key difference with Safire.
If neither you nor they can tell me with any technical detail what they are doing differently from a fusor in terms of construction or operation, then I conclude it's just a fusor. Is it multiple anodes? Is there some magnetic field being introduced?
Since yesterday I have put some meaningful effort into looking into what a Farnsworth Fusor is. At this point, I can confidently say that what is in the Safire type 2 plasma chamber is significantly different.
Perhaps I am biased because, most of my experience with plasma chambers has been involved in physical presence in laboratory settings.
>> I did my masters in Tokamak simulation
I think "simulation" is the key difference between what you did and those who are doing real laboratory work. Tesla lamented that too much in theoretical mathematics was being done in place of lab work.
I am honestly very disappointed that the essential characteristics between a Safire type 2 chamber and a Farnsworth Fusor are so clear to me, yet someone who has a "masters" (implies master degree) seems to struggle to spot the differences quickly.
The guys from the LLNL team were keen on immediately recognizing the differences, so no need to lose faith in humanity or anything here, but still, do they just give out masters degrees like candy now..
> Tesla lamented that too much in theoretical mathematics was being done in place of lab work.
This just shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Not only does Tesla predate the whole field of computational physics, but computational physics is distinct from both theoretical mathematics and lab work.
And I asked a simple question-- how is a SAFIRE constructed or operated? Still no answer!
So you don't dispute that the Safire type 2 plasma chamber has a sustained plasma fusion reaction that causes the tungsten rod to rapidly decay, got it.
Here's a hint if you need it spelled out for you: nobody gives a shit if you think this is "science" or "pseudoscience".
ITER has the same problem as the NIF, had they been designed a few years later it could be a fraction of the size and cost due to improvements in technology
But since ITER was designed decades ago, we're stuck with a massive, expensive, outdated beast that's taken so long to build it will likely end up being lapped by other projects.
At least NIF has something to show for it. ITER feels like building the Vasa.
And yet ITER is the only serious attempt at fusion research for power generation.
NIF is a nuclear weapons research program, as are all other (non-scam) ICF designs. Other MCF designs are either more-or-less legal scams (such as the MIT-derived startup claiming to build a working fusion power plant by the end of next or year or so), or woefully under funded.
> And yet ITER is the only serious attempt at fusion research for power generation.
I disagree, in two ways.
First, ITER is itself not a serious attempt at a fusion research program, although there is great pretense that it is. There is no plausible route from ITER to a practical reactor, even if it achieves every one of its goals.
Second, there are other attempts that are, IMO, much more promising. Helion and Zap are the two that come to mind.
There is a plausible route from a successful ITER to a practical reactor, the DEMO project. In principle, if ITER achieves its goals with its current technology, simply replacing the magnets with more modern ones would probably be enough to produce enough energy for a fusion plant.
The designs for actually capturing that energy, and for replenishing tritium, are a bigger hurdle, but there are plausible technical solutions.
Helion in contrast seems entirely a scam, promising and failing to deliver results year after year. Zap energy seems to at least not make false timeline promises, but it is trying out a much less proven concept in a direct commercial venture - not a promising way to do novel research.
Note that I am very skeptical that fusion power is a plausible economic approach to power generation, and do personally believe that all known approaches will fail to deliver a power plant that is economically viable. The amount of power that is plausible with all current approaches seems far too low to justify the immense engineering costs, and the benefit of abundant fuel is just not that impressive when you have solar and wind as alternatives.
Yeah, it's somewhat falling for the public relations spin to think NIF's fusion research is meant for power generation. NIF's fusion research is meant to simulate hydrogen bomb detonation physics.
The fact that they take a closer look at interesting power generation possibilities is a fringe-benefit: that's just scientists being thorough, but it's not why it was built. It's a bonus.
Tokamaks are 1960's technology. The future of economical fusion appears much more likely to be based on the field-reversed configuration (FRC). Helion expects to produce net positive energy production from a reactor designed primarily for He3 production in the next few years: https://www.helionenergy.com/
If tokomaks worked as well as Rockets, then I would agree. But the age of a technology does become relevant when you're discussing the history and development trajectory. The trajectory for FRC's looks far more promising. Direct electric conversion reduces the required efficiency by ~2x and the use of a low-neutron emissions fuel dramatically reduces shielding complexity and maintenance costs. And FRC requires much smaller reactors to reach net positive energy. Even considering high-temperature superconducting tokomaks, FRC's appear far more promising.
Agree, that will be the proof. But tokomaks have yet to do the same despite decades of investment.
We know that helion is able to recover 95% of the energy of every pulse. And they've measured the scaling laws. There doesn't seem to be anything that will prevent net positive energy in the reactor they're building right now.